I am a bit stalled (read working on something different) than my lifestyle photo management application, Nostalgia. I am taking a week of vacation with my parents in Florida. I will try to squeeze in 5 or 6 early morning before the kids wake up hours to finishing up the piece I was working on. I am working on something with a co-worker at www.lockandkeyid.com. He's teaching me stuff about PHP and cascading style sheets. Anyway, I thought of writing a series of articles as techno-lifestyle content that would surround my Nostaliga application website. I would probably need to solicit ideas from friends willing to write articles. The idea would be to market Nostalgia open source as a killer app that launches the next level of sophisticated techno family. We can talk about in detail all the things you can do to manage family life without relying on commercial applications like office,iLife,etc. These commercial applications can be compromised and bloated at times. They don't necessarily have the fringe features you want. They don't all play together (i.e. The Sum of the Whole is Greater than the Parts) I'd want to start a beacon, a network of websites, that implements open source albeit poor-mans versons of the types of applications we want. What we can't implement, we write articles about stuff already out there that we manually cobble together to meet our needs. We hope someone out there will capture our manual processes and build an application that can automate them.

Anyway, the first article I would write would be a step by step guide to linking all your financial accounts. I would build on top of that a decision maker application. For instance, we would run scenarios like - if I transferred money from my .001% money market to buy 10 shares of GOOGLE and sold a week later when I was up $300. Would I be ahead after taxes? A modern techo famiily that can think of 1000 of types of things a year may be able to earn some extra income. If we could automate the tasks, why wouldn't people try it? Maybe there would be a tally of all the ideas you went through for the year and if you were up or down money wise. My grandfather was a gambling man so this type of application has some appeal to me. I am amazed at how connected all my financial accounts are these days. I've got automatic savings into college funds and Roth IRA, flexible spending accounts, I can sell stock and transfer to my main checking account, I can of course pay bills without writing checks. I am sure security will be an issue but hopefully, someone won't just come around and suck up everything you've saved through electronic means. If only all these orgs provided RSS feeds that I could read in and fashion a personal portal with.